Newton North girls win fourth straight

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Newton North’s Yongyi Zhao tries to catch his breath after his leg of the 4 x 800 relay.

By Sarah MoomawGlobe Correspondent
January 13, 2013

It came down to the last event, but the Newton North girls’ track team left Reggie Lewis Track Center Saturday afternoon with what it came looking for — its fourth consecutive James Kalperis MSTCA State Relays title.

Except this year it was without the help of senior Carla Forbes, the triple jump national champion, who is injured.

“With this win tonight, it was important to establish our identity without Carla competing,” said Newton North coach Joe Tranchita. “It just shows these kids, they are real.”

But Forbes’s injury — patellar tendinitis — wasn’t the only hurdle the Tigers had to overcome. Sickness had two runners unavailable and a false start in the 4 x 50-yard shuttle hurdles put them behind early.

“Like Bill Belichick says, ‘If someone goes down, you just have to keep moving.’ That’s the attitude we’ve taken this season,” Tranchita said.

Going into the 4 x 400 relay, the last girls’ event of the meet, Newton North was deadlocked with Andover at 40 points. And both teams were seeded in the event’s sixth and final heat.

Through the first two laps on the 200-meter oval, the race was neck and neck, with Andover and Newton North pulling ahead as they raced for the relay title.

Andover took the lead at the first handoff, but the Tigers’ Shannon Fitzgerald quickly caught up and grabbed a sizable lead that her teammates held through the finish.

“I kept on thinking someone was going to pass me, so it made me pick up the pace,” Fitzgerald said. “We knew we had a lot of pressure on our hands, but I think we handled it really well.”

By the final lap, Andover had dropped back to finish seventh, while the Tigers beat Lexington across the line, winning in 4 minutes 0.05 seconds, just missing the Division 1 meet record by .76 seconds.